When Pascal Brousseau, Product Support Technology Representative (PSTR) from Ottawa Canada, recently met with the owner of a small landscaping business, he had an opportunity to correct a common misconception about JDLink™. “One of the things I hear often is that JDLink is designed for big contractors with huge fleets, spread over a large area, and that it doesn’t have much value for smaller owner operators,” shared Pascal. “So, when I met with this small customer I made sure to explain how Nortrax can use the benefits of JDLink to support ALL our customers, whether they have 100 machines or just one or two,” added Pascal.

As they were discussing the customer’s snowplowing business, the customer mentioned he’d been having issues with his John Deere 310SL backhoe loader. During the winter months, the machine is equipped with a specialized snow plow, that utilizes foldable hydraulic wings to enable the plow configuration to be changed from inside the cab as conditions warrant. To easily make plow changes, the operator should have simply been able to use his right thumb to activate the hydraulics, but an issue had surfaced which caused problems with this system.

Armed with information about the customer’s problems, Pascal took a few moments to begin performing a few functional checks on the machines various systems. While inside the cab of the machine, Pascal received a call from Daniel Gove, the Machine Monitoring Specialist (MMS) that supports his branch. “Daniel and I talk all the time, and it just so happened that he called me right as I was performing my tests,” said Pascal. “While we were on the phone, I asked him if he could run the machine’s serial number through John Deere’s system to check to see if there were any software updates that might be available for our problem,” added Pascal.

As today’s machines become increasingly more complex, one of the things that can sometimes occur is the software in the onboard computers develops a “bug”. Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a “bug” as: [an unexpected defect fault, flaw or imperfection, as in a mechanical device.] Often these slight errors in programming code are quickly recognized by John Deere and a new version of the code is released. Prior to the release of John Deere’s industry exclusive Remote Diagnostics and Programming, these “bugs” could only be removed by a dealer service technician connected directly to the machine with their laptop. Now, through the power of tools such as JDLink and Remote Diagnostics, Nortrax can deliver these software updates directly from an MMS to the machine, all performed remotely.

“Daniel was able to quickly send over the software, and I used the machines JDLink system to download it to the onboard computers,” explained Pascal. “I was able to install the new software and then ran a few tests to confirm the issue was fixed. Then I went in to the customer’s shop to let him know the good news!” said Pascal. The customer commented that he was amazed that because of something as simple as an active JDLink subscription, he had access to talented Nortrax employees like Pascal and Daniel and the solutions they can deliver.

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